Microsofties’ new idea: Dual-purpose Pakistani school

Microsoft employees Umaimah Mendhro and Mona Akmal chit-chat away, talking less to their interviewer than to each other. Once you get them on a roll about their charity, Dreamfly, you can barely stop them.

We’re sitting at the Kitanda coffee house. It’s located in a cozy but cold corner of a nondescript strip mall in a nondescript part of Redmond – in stark and ugly contrast to the parts of the world where Dreamfly aims to improve the lives of children and women.

They’ve built a school in Pakistan – their home country – and are still searching for a good location in India. They hope their newest school in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, will open this summer.

“They say: You educate a girl, you educate a village. That’s true, and that’s what we’re doing here,” Mendhro says, adding: “It’s not really literacy, even though literary art forms can open doors for you. But really what it’s about is the ability to think for yourself.”

They’ve only raised about $20,000 of the $60,000 they need to successfully open and run the Afghan school for a year – and Akmal is confident they’ll meet their goal. Much of the money they get is from fellow ‘Softies and, because of its donation-matching program, Microsoft itself ends up a significant donor.

But Dreamfly is for-profit; that’s the goal. The school campuses are dual-purpose: There are the classrooms and there are “design centers,” where mothers are trained to make goods and sell them to the United States. That commerce will, Mendhro and Akmal say, support the operating costs of education.

Courtesy of Dreamfly

At Dreamfly’s school in Pakistan, students are encouraged to have open discussions with their teachers. Click to visit gallery

It’s certainly not the only organization to take that approach, but for many of them social impact is almost a side effect. Dreamfly’s philosophy is the opposite.

“We want the for-profit part of it to run,” she says, “like they want to buy it.”

They’ve gotten the Pakistan school up and running with 120 children, a library and Internet access – a rarity “in the middle of nowhere,” Mendhro says. Dreamfly is partnering with other charities in Pakistan, Afghanistan and India for outreach, and they hope to build an organizational model for quickly expanding their operations into more countries.

I notice the three of us are coffeeless in a coffee house, and I’m wondering how Mendhro and Akmal make it all sound so easy. They work in Redmond, they raise money, they partner up with charities, they help train teachers … and work full-time at Microsoft, too?

Finally, I find a question that gets them to abruptly stop their chit-chattering. It’s an old journalists’ standby: What are your challenges?

Mendhro searches her mind and surprisingly comes up short. There aren’t really any challenges, she says.

“Are we doing enough? And can we continue to do this at a scale that’d be meaningful?” she says, attempting to answer. “I think the struggle from my perspective … is how can we do this … in a way that has a lasting impact?”

Mendhro

Akmal

Akmal cuts in. And she lets loose, from both of them, a cascade of challenges. Once again, I’m on the sidelines, listening to the women excitedly tell each other their struggles, their hopes and their ideas.

Akmal says she doesn’t enjoy fundraising. Mendhro says it’s difficult training teachers to encourage class discussion. Akmal says it’s tough finding enough committed volunteers. Mendhro says education can, so to speak, work against students because they realize they don’t want to work on a farm their whole lives and need to eventually get a job.

“In a way, these are the types of struggles that energize us,” Mendhro says.

“I feel,” Akmal responds, “like the energy of the organization, of Dreamfly, comes from Umaimah and myself. But we need to build that.”

They came up with the idea for Dreamfly in 2006 and really got things rolling in 2007. The women agree that Mendhro is better at out-of-the-box thinking – setting high goals for the organization – while Akmal keeps them grounded in reality.

“That’s why I work on a product team,” Akmal half-jokes, “and she works in incubation.”

Mendhro explains that she is a senior product manager for incubation in Microsoft’s Startup Business Group. Akmal is a senior lead production manager for the Windows Live team and has worked for the software giant since 2001.

Mendhro worked there for four years before going home to Pakistan in 2006 to start Dreamfly. She took a detour through Harvard Business School before returning to Microsoft last year.

Three other Microsofties work with them on Dreamfly, though Mendhro and Akmal certainly put in the most time. They have a communications rep in the U.K. and have Dreamfly representatives in each of the countries they’re currently focused on: Pakistan, Afghanistan and India.

Eventually, they say, they’ll have to pay some full-time Dreamfly employees to make their own dreams come true. It’s understandably tough to run a charity from halfway around the world.

After an hour, my brain and reporter’s notebook are both full. It’s nearly 6 p.m., and the women warn me to avoid the wrath of SR-520 heading back to Seattle.

I don’t, and sit stationary in traffic for a good 40 minutes. But in my head, their chit-chatting is still going. With that much philanthropic energy, without the boost of coffee, how could Mendhro and Akmal not have what it takes to run a for-profit charity?

“I think we generally,” Akmal had said an hour before, “have been taking the least-traveled path.”